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Chicago City Council to Low-wage Workers and Poor People: Eat Dirt!

The Chicago City Council has proved beyond doubt its aggressive hostility to the welfare of low-wage workers and low-income consumers by its approval of an ordinance that would forbid Chicagoans from legally entering into agreements to work for less than $10 an hour and $3 in benefits—even if they want to—with retailers with $1 billion in annual sales and stores of at least 90,000 square feet.

By prohibiting job-seekers from accepting terms of employment to their and potential employers’ mutual benefit, the City Council has effectively requested that major employers like Wal-Mart and Target open fewer new stores in Chicago, and make available fewer (and possibly no) new jobs. Additionally, the Council has asked Chicago’s low-income consumers, who would benefit most from more discount retail outlets, to forgo significant increases in their quality of life.

As NYU economist Jason Furman wrote in Slateby way of crushing Barbara Ehrenreich in a debate about the effect of Wal-Mart on America’s working class:

A range of studies has found that Wal-Mart’s prices are 8 percent to 39 percent below the prices of its competitors. The single most careful economic study, co-authored by the well-respected MIT economist Jerry Hausman, found that grocery sales by Wal-Mart and other big-box stores made consumers better off to the tune of 25 percent of food consumption. That doesn’t mean much for those of us in the top fifth of the income distribution—we spend only about 3.5 percent of our income on food at home and, at least in my case, most of that shopping is done at high-priced supermarkets like Whole Foods. But that’s a huge savings for households in the bottom quintile, which, on average, spend 26 percent of their income on food. In fact, it is equivalent to a 6.5 percent boost in household income—unless the family lives in New York City or one of the other places that have successfully kept Wal-Mart and its ilk away.

Why does the Chicago City Council insist on harming workers by denying them their moral right to enter into work agreements on terms they find acceptable? Why does the Chicago City Council want to keep things from getting better for its city’s poor?